About Technology Roadmapping

Any road will get you there.....

Use the term roadmap and people often think ’street directory’ – and indeed a technology roadmap holds many of the characteristics of a street directory, but with some important distinctions!

A street directory is often consulted to determine the best route to take. The driver compares the destination with the current location and looks at the major roads to be used for the journey. The driver knows the current location (Point A) and looks at the directory to locate the destination (Point B). Point B can be determined with some precision, usually by identifying the intersection of major roads nearby. As a result of consulting the street directory, the roads between A and B are well known and clearly visualised. Major and minor roads are often distinguished from one another. The driver is able to identify all roads between A and B and make a judgement about the best and most efficient overall route (amongst many potential alternative routes) by applying suitable decision making criteria.

With a technology roadmap, the current status of an innovation setting can be described. This is equivalent to Point A. The desired future state can be projected, and what this will look like can be rendered in some detail. This is equivalent to Point B. Then, it is possible to consider the issues that may influence the choice of route from Point A to Point B and make some decisions to define the route. All this makes the directory sound very similar to a technology roadmap.

Unfortunately, big problems emerge when you attempt to draw parallels between innovation and the process of consulting a street directory. For a start, almost all drivers arrive at the desired destination, even if it is a little frustrated and later than planned. This is completely at odds to the typical innovation experience, where the probability of failure is nine in ten. Inconveniently, the roadmap to the future does not contain each of the roads to the destination. The major and minor pathways to future innovation are often unclear and intersections near the destination correspondingly indistinct. Routinely, there are no clear indicators of the best route and several must be tried until it becomes apparent which is likely to be the most fruitful. Innovation may also fail because the ‘common sense’ criteria you apply can be precisely wrong.

With the ever hastening pace of change, there may be some tracks in the sand leading toward the future, but there is nothing like a set of roads to guide us to our destination. Looking 20 or 30 years forward can seem like standing at an abrupt discontinuation of a major freeway, peering off the edge of the tarmac towards the horizon, unsure about which gap in the bushes represents a viable path. Clearly, at this point, our roadmap analogy has struck a few corrugations (or even potholes). In fact, it is often worse than this. How then can we make innovation decisions when operating in such a ‘fact lite’ environment? Indeed, do technology roadmaps have any utility at all?

First, don’t give up hope. We are not lost explorers in the outback or jungle. We will probably never have the level of certainty implied by a street directory (or a GPS for that matter) but we do have some tools (an old compass or theodolite perhaps?) to help us make our way. We also have some broad learnings about what does and does not work in innovation and the beginnings of an understanding about why this might be the case. Succeeding in innovation requires a new set of rules and special thought processes.

In a technology roadmap:

we know some things about a start point but none of us possess perfect information about the economy, market, future shifts or innovation activities
we are able to describe the desired future but usually only with fuzzy terminology
we might be able to pick out some signposts that indicate directions towards the future, but the ones that should be taken note of and the probability we should assign to the prospect for success is highly uncertain
if we go to potential customers and ask for directions they may send us in completely the wrong direction
the one certainty is that we are facing ever increasing and ever more transformational change in society, the environment and the economy

What we understand about technology roadmapping is:

developing an effective roadmap is not simply about extrapolating what is happening now into the future
it is more about working backwards from standing in the future, making sure that full account is taken of major changes that are happening or predicted
the changes are important since they are most responsible for shifting customer perceptions about products and the importance and satisfaction with their attributes and benefits
technological innovation and new capabilities will be one of the major changes that must be considered
the use of expert opinion adds rigour to interpreting weak signals, particularly when compared to the alternative of uninformed arbitrary choices (guessing)
advancements in computing power, sophisticated software and data organisation allow us to create information landscapes from large data sets that provide world wide insights into innovation.

Technology Roadmaps have become popular tools because they do make a very worthwhile contribution to success in innovation. We do however need to read them and use thought processes that are more appropriate to innovation than the processes of using a street directory.

Posts on this website will unfold the structure, function and processes of technology roadmapping and make plain how this tool can be used to promote successful innovation, create a blueprint for collaboration in innovation and help direct open innovation efforts towards effective outcomes.

About Technology Roadmapping